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Water Shortages Will Bring Strife in New Millennium Limited water supplies will be a major source of international tension in coming years. In March, 1999, Israel and Jordan almost came to blows over water; more trouble lies ahead. By GSReport Start Date: 3/25/99 The handwriting is already on the wall. Water supplies will become a key source of international tension in the years ahead. Even now, an estimated 1.4 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, and that number could increase by nearly one billion more by 2025, according to recent U.N. studies. During the month of March, 1999, the nations of Israel and Jordan almost came to blows over water. It may be a sign of bigger trouble ahead. When Jordan signed a peace accord with Israel in 1994, one of the key provisions was that Israel would guarantee a fixed amount of water to Jordan from shared sources in the Sea of Galilee and the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers. But the past year has been one of the driest the Middle East has seen in the last 30 years. Every nation in the region is suffering the affects of the drought. And Israel has announced that, as a result, it will cut water supplies to Jordan by as much as half. Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon's office said that the agreement with Jordan did not take into account the affects of prolonged drought. But Jordanian officials say their own water crisis is more severe than Israel's. The dispute is so serious that Jordanian lawmakers on March 17 proposed to revoke the 1994 peace treaty unless Israel reverses its current water policy. That motion failed to gain majority support, but the 80-member Jordanian Chamber of Deputies did denounce Israel's planned water cut, saying it "violated a fundamental element of the treaty." The unilateral act of cutting water supplies without negotiation "casts suspicion on the Middle East peace process as a whole," Jordan's parliament said. Jordan's water reservoirs are at critically low levels as the hot, rainless summer months approach. According to a report issued by the U.S. embassy in Damascus earlier this month, "Without some immediate relief in coming weeks, the effects of the drought will... very likely lead to municipal water rationing [and] cutoffs for many hours per day in Damascus, where the water problem is most acute." But similar problems loom throughout the Middle East and in many other parts of the world as well. One of the main reasons for Israel's refusal to return the Golan Heights to Syria is that those hills have become a source of water for northern Israel. Similarly, members of Israel's Likud government have said the West Bank can never be turned over to the Palestinians because Israel depends heavily on water from an aquifer there. In Turkey, plans to dam the upper reaches of both the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers have drawn harsh protest from Syria and Iraq. The Tigris flows directly to Iraq from Turkey, while the Euphrates is a major source of water for Syria before flowing into Iraq. Upstream versus downstream disputes of this nature are becoming more common worldwide. The majority of nations on Earth share at least a portion of their water supplies with one or more other nations. Upstream industrial dumping, diversion of water for irrigation, damming for hydro-power and the increased consumption of growing human populations mean that downstream water supplies are becoming more polluted and less available. At this time, an estimated 1.4 billion people do not have access to adequate supplies of safe water. According to recent U.N. studies, that number will likely increase to about 2.3 billion by the year 2025. Lack of safe water now accounts for a staggering three billion cases of illness per year, U.N. sources estimate. At any given time, as many as half of all people in developing nations are suffering from a water-related illness. Some 5 million human deaths per year are attributed to inadequate or unsafe water. "As we approach the next century, more than a quarter of the world's population, or a third of the population in developing countries, live in regions that will experience severe water scarcity," the International Water Management Institute, based in Sri Lanka, said in report on growing water scarcity. The most severe shortages are projected to be in Africa and the Middle East. Other affected areas will include parts of India, China, the Andean region of South America, Central Europe and even England. Even as water resources dwindle, there are numerous ways to increase supplies. Among the approaches cited by a U.N. commission are less expensive desalination plants, more efficient irrigation procedures, more water recycling, more aggressive efforts to locate underground aquifers, breeding food crops that require less water, and developing means to move large quantities of water over long distances. At present, two-thirds of the world's people live in regions receiving only one-fourth of the world's rainfall, the U.N. says. An analysis sponsored by the U.N. Environment Program and U.N. University estimates that clean, safe water can be made available to people in rural areas for about $50 per person, and in urban areas for about $105 per person.
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